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IMHO this is an absolutely fatal design flaw. It means that if it were to become very popular eventually the largest instances would take over the network due to network effects. ActivityPub has eventual centralization baked in.

Nostr is closer to a real decentralized social network, though it has other problems. Chief among these is trying to be Twitter, which has always been a model of interaction that lends itself to obnoxiousness. This was also a problem with Mastodon. If we're trying to do better, we should not be trying to duplicate a toxic environment. Still Nostr is architecturally superior.

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Can you expand on the Nostr problems? Honest question. I mostly see it trying to offer another (architecturally better and robust to censorship) mechanism for group communication.

I think (hope, TBH) that Nostr can fill the niche of the Usenet of the past where some groups did slide into obnoxiousness but others maintained intelligent and thoughtful discussions for many years. My 2c.

I always liked the reddit post-scarcity solution to this -- make it as easy as possible to fork / start a new community.

Users will vote with their feet.

What was required to start a new usenet domain? (a bit before my time)

> What was required to start a new usenet domain?

Assuming you mean a new newsgroup (discussion forum for a single topic e.g. comp.lang.lisp):

- If you wanted it in the Big 8 hierarchy, you had to campaign for it and get support and prove it would have traffic.

- If you wanted it in alt.*, you just posted a control message (and then everyone ignored your group)

Or you could make your own hierarchy but it's up to each individual server which hierarchies they carry.

Nostr is not trying to be Twitter; Nostr the protocol is more generalized than that. It just so happens that a lot of people want a Twitter alternative right now, so that's a popular Nostr webapp to make.

There is also Nostr chess, Nostr podcasting, Nostr marketplaces, Nostr data vending machines, Nostr blogs, and more. See https://nostrapps.com/ for a sample of what people are making.

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